dreams
by jane hidell
Summary: John and Kate have both been haunted by dreams, but on the eve of their reintroduction, the dreams are a little different...


Characters aren't mine, blah blah. And the formatting is probably very wonky. I apologize. :/

**Dreams**

1

          _With every step another skull turned to powder beneath his feet.  The landscape was never anything but skulls, no other bones, no clothing, no buildings or vehicles. Only skulls, millions of skulls, skulls that once held eyes that once looked out upon loved ones standing under skies filled with sunlight._

_          Usually he walked until something happened, and usually what happened was the appearance of either an HK or a Terminator or two. He would then awaken in a sweaty panic, until he fell back asleep and it started all over again. _

_But tonight he had been walking for a very long time, and nothing had happened. All around was death and quiet, no noise but the crunching of bone under his shoes._

_For want of anything better to do, he continued walking._

_At some point he noticed a person several hundred feet ahead of him.  The person was kneeling on the skull-carpeted ground, facing away from him._

_He tried to yell, but the dream had rendered him voiceless.  He tried to run, but the skulls sank beneath his feet like wet sand._

_As he slowly got closer to the figure, he could tell that it was a woman. For an awkward moment he thought her head was on fire, but he quickly realized that it was the shock of her red hair against the dead gray land surrounding them._

_By the time he reached her his legs were aching. He collapsed onto his knees next to her, sending up an almost comical cloud of skull dust._

_The young woman turned to look at him, and he was struck both by the beauty of her face and the familiarity of her smile.  She tried to say something, but the dream had taken her voice, too. Instead she took his hand in hers, and her touch seemed to fill up all that had been gradually drained from him by these dreams, these visions of his future…._

Connor jerked awake, gasping.  He blinked at the fire several times, the image of the woman in his dream fading after a few seconds.  The warm feeling she had given him left as well, and he shivered, colder now than he had felt even in the dream.

He was so used to waking up from bad dreams that it was hard to say if they even bothered him anymore, at least in the sense of interfering with his life; the bad dreams were just a part of it. But this hadn't _felt like a bad dream....The details were already hazy, but the dream had left an almost hopeful feeling behind._

And that was bothering him.

2

          _She was walking down the same familiar street. It was all so peaceful, all the people so happy, just a regular main street in middle __America__.  She couldn't help but smile as she passed a father pulling his two young daughters behind him a red wagon. Such a simple game was sending the little girls into fits of gleeful laughter._

_          But then the sickness began to form in her stomach, and she knew what was coming. She tried to scream at the father, tried to warn him to get his girls inside, but no sound would come, and the threesome happily continued along the sidewalk._

_          The fire came from everywhere – the sky, the trees, doorways, the people themselves. Within seconds everything was on fire, except for her. She ran as fast as she could, occasionally bursting out of the fire, trying to warn the people whom the fire had not yet reached. But it always caught up to her, enveloping her and everything else. But she continued to run unscathed, not even feeling the heat._

_          She ran until she was drained of both hope and energy, eventually crumpling to the ground. All around her was noise, screams of people dying and buildings collapsing and the roar of the fire. It filled her head until she couldn't think, and this was usually when she woke up trembling._

_          But suddenly someone was next to her, hauling her to her feet. Stunned, she tried to get a good look at this young man who had come out of nowhere; while he seemed familiar, the fire was too intense for her to see him clearly. They ran together, him dragging her along when her legs faltered. She held onto him tightly, desperate not to lose him in the inferno._

_          Soon they broke out of the fire, and the young man slowed down. She tried to pull him forward, jabbering that the fire would catch up with them soon. But he held her by the shoulders until she calmed down. He smiled and assured her that the fire wouldn't get them. She felt herself believing him, even as she looked over his shoulder as the wall of fire_

Kate sat up in bed with a yelp. Scott stirred next to her but didn't wake up.  She lay back down, sweating; she kicked the covers off and closed her eyes. 

          The dream again. She had been having it more and more lately, but tonight…tonight it had ended differently.  That guy…she knew him, but she couldn't remember from where. But he'd never been in the dream before…and she felt calmer than she normally did afterwards. But what did it _mean? Did it mean _anything_?_

          She had almost drifted back to sleep when her phone went off.  Reading it groggily, she shook the dream from her mind. No time to worry about it now.      __


End file.
